“The ugliest thing is when we all start to blame each other.” This is what Secretary General of the Ministry of Social Affairs Loes Mulder said on Thursday in her hearing in the Lower House about the childcare allowance affair. Yet that is exactly the picture that lingers after the first week of interrogation by the Parliamentary Interrogation Committee on Childcare Allowance.
Roughly speaking, the Ministries of Finance, which include the Tax and Customs Administration / Benefits, and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment blamed each other for the benefits affair this week.
In two weeks, the Chamber will investigate how things could have gone wrong in the childcare allowance affair. What was intended to provide financial support for families with young children became a drag on many years for thousands of people. The parents were wrongly regarded by the tax authorities as fraudsters and sometimes had to repay tens of thousands of euros. With financial and social problems as a result.
‘Policy implemented’
Top officials from the Tax and Customs Administration who were interrogated said they were implementing Social Affairs policy. And that they had no legal room to be less harsh on parents.
Former State Secretary Frans Weekers, responsible for the tax authorities until 2014, shared his most senior official’s doubts that the policy was not too harsh. “He wrote ‘yes’ in the margin of my note about it”, said former director general Peter Veld of the Tax and Customs Administration. According to him, then Minister Lodewijk Asscher of Social Affairs knew about the doubts, but nothing changed.
Never raised the alarm
Social Affairs actually says that the Tax and Customs Administration has never raised the alarm. And never said that the legislation was wrong and had to be amended.
Marcelis Boereboom, director general of Social Affairs, had heard that the tax authorities considered the ‘all-or-nothing approach’ “disproportionate”. It meant that if parents had not paid their own contribution, they had to repay the entire childcare allowance of thousands of euros. But even then nothing changed.
“We did not have the image that we had commissioned a fraud hunt”, said childcare director at Social Affairs Maaike van Tuyll. Nevertheless, the so-called Combi Teams Approach Facilitators (CAF teams) of the Tax and Customs Administration set to work on collecting fraud certificates in an extreme way, according to her.
Policy avalanche
This allowed civilians to be disadvantaged for years, while the official mills were running.
Civil servants thought they were implementing the politically desired policy. Top civil servants changed positions without handing over the childcare file. A compensation plan for the parents of State Secretary Menno Snel was broken for vague reasons. An entirely new childcare system that should have been improved was discontinued by the cabinet after two years of preparation. There were expert meetings, memos, PowerPoint presentations and reports.
Due to the policy avalanche, which also regularly changed direction, everyone eventually lost sight of what was really going on. Namely that parents who wanted to help the government financially, were pushed into long-term debt by the same government. That parents who had to find work easier because of the childcare allowance, had to quit their job to look after their children themselves again.
It ‘missing memo’ Legal adviser Sandra Palmen of the Tax Authorities could have put an end to this in March 2017. “How could anyone ever give permission for this?”, Palmen wondered. But her advice remained ignored and hidden away until a few weeks ago.
Also the duped parents watched this week to the hearings. Emotional and with a mixture of hope and exasperation:
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